From EU Integration to Brussels Effect: Changing Role of Standards under the AI Act

Standards play a critical role in the implementation of the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, enabling companies to demonstrate compliance with the AI Act requirements. The European Commission (EC) delegated rulemaking to European Standardisation Organisations (ESOs) to achieve the AI Act's regulatory goals. The delegated rulemaking places the success of the AI Act in the hands of private companies, constituting the majority of standardisation experts. ESOs are tasked with setting standards in the constantly technologically evolving field of AI within a bureaucratic, procedure-heavy institutional setting. While standards historically played a critical role in EU integration, I argue that with the AI Act, the EC aims to transform standardisation into a policy instrument for Brussels effect enforcement. In this paper, I contextualise AI Act standardisation through procedural and stakeholder dynamics. The empirical analysis is based on process tracing combined with semi-structured interviews and document analysis of EC and ESOs reports, public documents on AI standardisation, and documents obtained through Freedom of Information Requests. I rely on a framework of skills and resources of policy capacity to examine the stakeholder dynamics within the institutional context of EU standardisation. I find that the EC increased its engagement beyond the approval role prescribed by Regulation 1025/2012 and the Vademecum on European standardisation. The EC is introducing intermediary procedural checks, leading to more active engagement with standardisation. I analyse how technology companies and the EC engage with institutional dynamics. The paper examines rules of participation and procedures, staffing of experts, their choice between active and passive participation, and corresponding EC participation dynamics. The findings on the processes of the AI Act standardisation can help situate standardisation provisions of other digital regulations under the EU Fit for Digital Age package, such as Digital Services, Digital Markets, Data, and Data Governance Acts.